I did a three year long experiment with my child. No, it is nothing that is cruel, yes, it is ethical, to a certain extent. I tried getting my child's consensus to agree to the experiment, but she was only 5 months old. The experiment was based on a language teaching theory. There are many people, especially the older generation in my culture who would speak to children with a different language. The best way to describe this language is 'baby-talk'.
Normally, this refers to certain words that a child is unable to pronounce and would replace it with a similar sounding word. As the child's language is not fully developed, that is fine. However, when adults start doing that it creates a problem. As some may not be familiar with this kind of language, here are a few examples:
i) The repetition of action words: walk-walk , run-run, love-love.
ii) Representing common words with sounds : Mam-mam (eat), oi-oi (sleep), jut-jut (pacifier).
iii) Mixing dialect with English: kai-kai (go out and walk), bao-bao(carry).
So, with the examples above, a common sentence would be:
"Hey little one, would you like to kai-kai? We can walk-walk before you oi-oi."
It sounds really cute. However, the problem comes later on in life. I remember one particular course in my university days where it was recommended that a parent speak to a child the same way how they would speak to an adult. One of the main reason is because the child would have to unlearn what they have learnt.
Unlearn and Relearn
Imagine if you are the child and all your life, you were spoken to with this form of baby-talk. When you start studying in a preschool, it is likely that the teacher will tell the child to speak properly. The child will then have to go through a process of re-learning the language, getting rid of words that have been ingrained in his/her mind since a very young age.
This makes further acquisition of grammar and vocabulary to be particularly difficult. While many children do eventually learn how to speak correctly, the process of re-learning the language at a later age is rather unnecessary. In addition, in cultures like mine where the child will be exposed to more than one language, this will only add to the confusion. Children from where I am from are exposed to at least three languages in pre-school in order to prepare them for primary school. As such, why not prepare the child to speak correctly from a very young age?
The experiment
With that in mind, my wife and I have been speaking to our eldest daughter like how we would, an adult. From the age of two, her vocabulary was more than 200 words and she could string sentences, although at times, incorrectly. It is interesting as well how it is theorized that toddlers are able to pick up complex grammar rules without really understanding grammar. One example would be the correct use of past and present tense as well as singular and plural words.
She has also been able to speak in complex sentences. Complex sentences are sentences that has a subordinating conjunction. An example would be the use of 'because' and 'since' in the sentence. The only problem thus far is her refusal to learn a second language. No, it is not that I want my child to learn more than one language for fun, but it is mandatory in school. Perhaps, I will cross that bridge one day.
There are two lessons that can be learnt from this experiment. First of all, children are never to young to learn something, even language. The second lesson is that mastery comes with practice and exposure. It is through speaking to them with the correct sentence structure and pronunciation which will help the child develop their language skills. Now if you would excuse me, I'm going to see if this works for my second child. Hopefully, the results end up being the same.
